"You interrupted me, Miss Penelope, or rather I got carried away with having so much to tell all at once; and then I stuck fast. However, as I was saying, that's the squaw! The Selbys are the parents, and you've got the baby in this house! You needn't look at me, cousin, as if I was crazy, for I ain't. It's Muriel--your Muriel--that I mean. Ask Annette Bruneau--by rights she should have been here, too, to make the thing complete, and to speak for herself; but, as I have spoken for all the rest, I may say for her that she would not let herself be brought. She ran upstairs and locked herself into her room, so we had to come along without her. Why don't you send for Muriel to see her mother. Miss Penelope? and Matildy should be here, too. She spoke very harsh to me the last time we met; but she was mad, then, so I bear no grudge. She'll be better friends now. And she _should_ be here, too, to see the meeting of the long-lost child and her parents. It'll be real touching, and she deserves to see it, for she has been like a mother to Muriel--I'll allow that, for all that she said to me some weeks back." Penelope fetched Muriel and Matilda, and the explanations were long and confused, mingled with embraces and many tears. Even Considine blew his nose, and the policeman passed his sleeve across his eyes; only the squaw looked on unmoved. "If all these whites were happy, as they said they were, why did they shed tears?" The rush of words grew slower and more fitful after a while. Emotion is exhausting, whether it be grief or joy. Mary Selby sat with her arms round her daughter's waist, and her face buried in her bosom, while Matilda, half-jealous, and feeling half-bereaved, held the girl's hand. Betsey stood up and surveyed the scene. It seemed her own handiwork, for had she not brought these people together? The emotional silence, when every one was filled with the same idea, made her think of the closing tableau in a pantomime, and to feel herself the beneficent spirit who had brought about the happy _dénouement_. She could not refrain from holding out her parasol over so many bowed heads. It seemed to her to have become a magic wand, tipped with a sparkling star. She could fancy, too, that her gown had transformed itself into tinsel and transparent draperies, and that she was being slowly carried up through the ceiling to the sound of plaintive music. Much could have been done with Betsey, I verily believe, if she had been caught early and submitted to culture. But "Tollover's Circus" had been her only introduction to the world of plastic imagination, scenic, or pictorial art; saving always "Godey's Magazine of the Fashions," which instructed her in a variety of knowledge she would have been better without, the knowledge, not very accurately stated, of how women with ten times her fortune, if she should ever come to have any, wear their clothes. CHAPTER XVIII. THE BROKER BROKE.